“... The​ teenager was born, it’s sometimes said, in America in the mid-1950s, when Little Richard released ‘Tutti Frutti’ and Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Thirty years later, the Thatcher government made a less exuberant contribution to the way the transition to adulthood is imagined. A new type of policy problem had come to light in the form of the working-age youth who was not in work, education or training, and risked getting stuck in that situation ...”

“... of Christ should be seen as his ‘entrance into enemy territory’, an ‘undermining’ of the powers of the world, like a Royal Engineer tunnelling under German lines. Reading the gospel story, ‘we are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice … for the story of ...”

“... an Arriva bus and quits Leeds via Hunslet, which also appears more or less obliterated since Richard Hoggart, who described its working-class culture so memorably in The Uses of Literacy, grew up there. Next comes Woodlesford, where McKie gazes round for any trace of the rhubarb for which the place was once well known, and we chug onwards to ...”

“... of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves into the breach on wet ...”

“... perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has ...”

“... exhibition. ‘I have risked everything to achieve fame,’ he told Ricciardi as he pitched his powers against Veronese’s – a climax to two decades in which his year had pivoted on Rome’s big March exhibition, held at the Pantheon, and its August one, at San Giovanni Decollato. Xavier Salomon, in a catalogue essay about these artist-organised ...”

“... A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Nothing makes us more critical – more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused ...”

“... is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard Sugg is devoted. The belief that a wide range of maladies could be cured by the consumption of human remains – principally in the form of so-called ‘mummy’ – persisted in Europe for at least six centuries. Although the administration of such ...”

“... presence’; and he wonders aloud whether for such a man a love-life was possible. Raymond’s powers of withdrawal, his lack of close friends, his absence of hilarity or gregariousness ... must have made him a terribly matter-of-fact father and husband; he couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the ...”

“... a mining engineer who had recently acquired a Holt Caterpillar Tractor with surprising powers of travelling across country. As Swinton says, ‘this knowledge lay dormant in my mind until ten weeks after the War had broken out. When it did recur to me it was as if a ray of light had struck a sensitised plate.’ In September 1914, very soon after ...”

“... is that meddling and cynicism on the part of Eritrea’s neighbours, the European colonial powers and chiefly the two main Cold War adversaries, created the moral and political catastrophe of which so few outsiders had an inkling. Even twenty years ago, at the time of Bob Geldof’s involvement in the regional famine, Eritrea remained an obscure ...”

“... literary system of facts and values is at best an illusion and at worst an imposition by the powers that be of an orthodoxy designed to suppress dissent. It is thought to be an illusion for the reason that both the form and the content of a discourse are not self-generated, but have the shape they do by virtue of relationships (of similarity and ...”

“... 11 September attacks); signs of a Saudi-Iranian rapprochement; the new assertiveness of other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of major Saudi oilfields – had placed in doubt the Saudi role as a reliable ‘swing producer’, which could turn the taps on or off whenever it was in America’s strategic ...”

“... specialists out of the policy-making process. Wills gives the example of the Bay of Pigs, when Richard Bissell, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans, kept his plan to invade Cuba from the CIA’s own experts. Wills also says that ‘nominally’ subordinate executive branch agencies kept important security information from the ...”

“... gives short shrift to this larger story, and misses how remarkable it was that these two imperial powers, in the middle of the Second World War, agreed to rewrite the rules of global capitalism to make the world safe for the interventionist Keynesian state. The convocation of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, where the Keynes-White deal ...”